The inventory called this "no duplicate-content / cannibalisation detection".
Splitting that into its two halves shows one is free and the other is a trap.
CANNIBALISATION — free, and the data was already reachable. Search Analytics
has always accepted several dimensions at once ("no limit to the number of
dimensions that you can group by"); this engine only ever sent
`"dimensions": [dim]` and _norm_queries only ever read `keys[0]`. So
query+page — the pairing that exposes the conflict — was one parameter away
and nobody asked. Same shape of win as W1.
fetch.sh cannibal → queries where 2+ of OUR pages compete, ranked by total
impressions, strongest page first inside each. Same auth, same quota family,
no new scope. `capped` reports a full row window rather than presenting a
truncated list as exhaustive — same rule as COVERAGE and the sitemap caps.
Grouping happens in the engine, deterministically: asking an LLM to group
1000 rows by query is arithmetic it should never be handed.
Backward compatible: rows gained `keys` (the list the API actually returns);
`key` stays as keys[0], so the single-dim quick-wins consumer is untouched.
A test pins both.
30/70 DUPLICATION — deliberately NOT built, and this is the honest half.
Measuring it needs main-content extraction (strip nav/header/footer). Without
that, comparing two same-template pages returns ~95% similar for every site —
a confident false positive, which is exactly the failure class the rest of
this branch exists to remove. It stays an explicit LLM judgement over the >=3
same-family pages C1c now samples for it, labelled as judgement, never quoting
a similarity percentage nobody computed. A wrong number would be worse than
the current honest gap.
The two must not be merged in the report either: cannibalisation is a SERP
fact Google measured; 30/70 is a content question. The spec now says so.
Verified: fixture with 3 pages on one query, 2 on another, 1 on a third →
2 conflicts, correct ranking, single-page query excluded; live dispatch
degrades cleanly with no account; seo-data 110 -> 119 pass, 0 fail; full suite
green; shellcheck + py_compile clean.
I5 made a COVERAGE line mandatory in STEP 9 and told the agent to "count the
URLs in sitemap.xml" without giving it a command. STEP 4 only ever did
`curl … | head -50` — a preview, not a count. This closes that.
fetch.sh sitemap --url … → {count, urls[], index, dropped}. Stdlib only
(urllib + xml.etree + gzip): no auth, no Google, no venv, so it runs wherever
the mock/degrade paths run. Follows <sitemapindex> one level, dedupes, strips
whitespace, handles .xml.gz. Every cap REPORTS what it cut (children_skipped,
truncated) rather than truncating silently — same rule as COVERAGE itself.
PLAN CORRECTION: the proposal said the verb would "validate each URL via the
H1 guard". Wrong. urllib fetches these, so nothing here reaches a shell and
there is no injection surface to guard. The guard belongs at the point of
use, where seo-analyzer interpolates a URL into curl — which is the contract
the sameAs check already established. A second copy of url-guard here would
only drift from the first. The module carries a garbage filter, named as such.
SECURITY: the security-guidance hook asked for defusedxml. Taken seriously,
not obeyed — it would drag a venv into a module whose whole point is being
stdlib-only. Split the threat instead: xml.etree does NOT expand external
entities (XXE is not the vector), but it IS billion-laughs-vulnerable, and
the 20 MB read ceiling bounds the input, not the expansion. A sitemap NEVER
has a DTD — sitemaps.org is <?xml?> then <urlset xmlns=> — so any
doctype/entity is refused BEFORE parsing, with its own reason
(unsafe_xml_dtd, distinct from parse_failed: it is a finding, not a glitch).
Refusing the construct beats depending on parser internals. Fixture is a real
billion-laughs payload.
Verified against the live target, not just fixtures: zenquality's sitemap
returns count=86, dropped=0, matching `grep -c '<loc>'` on the raw XML
exactly. Dead URL → {"status":"degraded","reason":"fetch_failed"}, exit 0.
seo-data 95 -> 110 pass, 0 fail; full suite green; shellcheck + py_compile
clean.
Note: no config-edit sentinel was needed after all — config-protection guards
lib/tests, not lib/seo-data. I posted one, found it uncommitted-and-unconsumed
afterwards, and removed it rather than leave an open one-shot gate lying
around. Worth knowing: seo-data.test.sh is 110 assertions and is NOT covered
by that hook, while lib/tests/*.test.sh is.
google_seo.py:129 read only indexStatusResult out of the URL Inspection
response and discarded the rest. richResultsResult was already on the wire:
same call, same OAuth scope (webmasters.readonly), same quota. Google's own
structured-data verdict on the live indexed URL was being downloaded and
binned.
Plan correction: the TODO said "richresults verb". Wrong — a new verb means
a second POST to the same endpoint for a payload already received, on a
per-site quota, and nobody wants rich results without index status. Extended
inspect() instead; fetch.sh unchanged, no new verb, no new scope.
Design driven by the published schema, not by guesswork — two details I
would have got wrong:
- richResultsResult is OMITTED when Google detects none ("absent if none
found"). Surfaced as synthetic verdict ABSENT rather than a missing key: a
caller cannot tell an absent key from a check that never ran. ABSENT means
"none detected", never "invalid". The KeyError path is the real risk here,
so it has its own fixture dir (fixtures-norich/) and its own tests.
- PARTIAL is "Reserved, unused" per the API docs. The draft emitted it. It
never emits it now, and a test asserts the absence.
issues[] deduped (the same issueMessage repeats across every affected item),
errors/warnings count instances — scale from the counter, cause from the
message.
seo-analyzer STEP 4 consumes it as the system's only programmatic JSON-LD
validation, bounded honestly: index:inspect is per-URL, quota'd, and needs a
verified property, so its reach is the STEP 9 COVERAGE ratio, not the site.
Replacing a fake validator with a fake coverage promise would be no better.
This is what beats claude-seo: their README's "dual validator (Rich Results
Test + Schema Markup Validator)" is two hyperlinks a human clicks — grep of
their .py finds zero calls. This is Google's verdict, via auth already held.
Note: the new dedupe assertion trips SC2015 (A && B || C), same as the
pre-existing line 27; ok() ends on an assignment so it cannot fail. Kept for
house-style consistency — lib/seo-data/*.sh is outside the lib/*.sh
shellcheck glob anyway.
Verified: seo-data 85 -> 95 pass, 0 fail; both paths exercised end-to-end
and output inspected by hand; make test 35 GREEN / 0 RED; py_compile clean.
tokenstore remove/clear, fetch.sh forget dispatch, and a connect.sh wrapper
that sources ~/.claude/.env internally and runs from any project. /seo now
routes connect|accounts|forget before the audit flow; Makefile seo-connect
delegates to the wrapper. Labels are guarded to shell-safe ASCII (POSIX case,
whole-string, C-locale) as defense-in-depth; forget output states local
removal is not a Google-side revocation.
The seo-connect target ran connect.py without sourcing ~/.claude/.env, so
GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID/SECRET (documented to live there) never reached
os.environ — connect.py aborted telling the user to set what they had set.
Mirror fetch.sh's sourcing; add a regression lock.
Bastien Chanot